What Is Local SEO, and How Is It Different From Regular SEO?
Pick up your phone, type the thing you sell followed by “near me,” and look at what comes back. Three businesses under a small map, sitting above every website on the page like the popular table in a school cafeteria. If yours is not one of the three, the person who searched is already on the phone with one of them, describing their problem to your competitor. As a local SEO company in Santa Barbara, we think the plainest way to explain local SEO is to start with that map.
SEO for searches with a place in them
Local SEO is the work of getting a business found when somebody searches for something nearby. Pool service in Thousand Oaks. A plumber in Goleta, at eleven at night, urgently. Dinner near State Street for four people who cannot agree on anything. Some of those searches name the town. Plenty of them do not, because Google already knows where the phone is. It always knows.
Google describes it in its own help pages:
When a customer searches for a business or place near their location, they'll find local results on Google Maps and Search.Google Business Profile Help, Tips to improve your local ranking on Google
Regular SEO is about your web pages ranking. Local SEO adds a second contestant: your Business Profile, the listing with your pin, your hours, your photos and your reviews. Same results page, two different games, and most businesses are only playing one of them.
Two races on one results page
- A business with a pin★★★★★ reviews, hours, directions
- Another business with a pin★★★★ reviews, hours, directions
- A third business with a pin★★★★★ reviews, hours, directions
- Roof Repair in Your TownA page about one service in one place
- A directory of roofers near youSomebody else's list, with you on it or not
A drawing, not a real search. The point is the shape: one search, two separate races, and local SEO runs in both.
Plenty of businesses are winning one and forfeiting the other. A gorgeous profile pointing to a one-page website that has said “coming soon” for three years. A great website with a profile nobody has opened since the day it was claimed, still showing the old phone number and a photo of an empty parking lot. Either way, half the page goes to somebody else for free.
What Google says decides the map
Google does not publish its formula. It does publish the ingredients list, which is more than most secret recipes give you.
Local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity. Together, these factors help Google find the best match for customers' searches.Google Business Profile Help, Tips to improve your local ranking on Google
The same page calls the third one prominence in its heading. Popularity or prominence, it means how well known you are. Yes, it is a little bit high school.
- RelevanceGoogle's words: "Relevance is how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for." In practice that is your categories, the services you list and a description written in the words customers actually type, not the words on your truck. Your truck says "Quality Since 1987." Nobody has ever searched for that.
- Distance"Distance refers to how far each business is from the customer who's searching." Nobody can change this one, short of moving the shop. It is why a business can be first in its own parking lot and invisible two towns over.
- ProminenceGoogle says it is "based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have." This is the part that rewards years of being talked about around town, which is a little annoying if you opened in March.
Distance is the one owners ask about most, and we dug into it in whether you can rank in more than one city. Prominence is why a directory can outrank you in your own town.
What local SEO work actually looks like
None of this is mysterious. Most of it simply never got done, or got done once by somebody’s nephew and was never touched again.
- A complete profile. Google: "Businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results." Every category that fits, every service, real hours, real photos of real jobs. Not the stock photo of a smiling man holding a clipboard.
- Reviews, asked for every time. Not one big push a year when somebody remembers. And replied to, including the one from the customer who was upset about the parking. Google puts it simply: "When you reply to customer reviews, it shows that you value their feedback."
- A page for each service. The profile points at your website, and the website has to back it up. One page listing twelve services is one résumé applying for twelve different jobs. Google gives it one weak match for all twelve.
- Mentions on other local sites. The chamber, local press, suppliers, trade associations. That is the "how many websites link to your business" part of prominence, and the closest thing local search has to word of mouth.
- Checking from the right place. A ranking checked from your own desk tells you where you rank at your desk. Your customers are rarely sitting at your desk.
That list is the core of our local SEO services. The last point catches more owners than any other, which is why we wrote you’re not ranking where you think you are. And if you opened this year, the order you do all this in matters, as we covered in how to rank when you’re the new business in town.
How you know local SEO is working
In May 2024, Primary Pool Services had forty pools on the route and was found for two searches, both of them their own name. Now, for one search, swimming pool service near me, they are first in 24 of 25 places across Thousand Oaks. In fifteen months the route went from forty pools to more than two hundred. The Primary Pools case study shows the working.
That is the right way to measure it. Not one ranking checked from one spot, but where you show up across the whole area you serve, and whether the phone rings more. Rankings are nice. Ringing is the point.
Send us your website. We will show you where you appear across the town you serve, who holds the three spots for the searches that bring you work, and what it would take to join them. No charge, and no obligation. Or call or text 805.243.8321.
Get My Free Visibility ReportLocal SEO is not a different kind of SEO. It is the same job with a map attached, and a customer who is usually holding the phone in one hand and their keys in the other. It belongs inside SEO done properly.